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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Howler.js Audio Library for the Modern Web

Howler.js provides a modern audio library with support for the Web Audio API and a fallback mechanism for HTML5 Audio. The project strives to streamline cross-platform development efforts with audio in JavaScript.

Howler.js offers a consistent API for using audio with JavaScript, with control over common audio patterns including play, pause, seek to rate, fade and loop. Audio files are automatically cached where possible to improve playback performance.

SitePen senior software engineer Paul Shannon shares his thoughts with InfoQ on Howler.js and the present and future of Web Audio:

Web audio is like Canvas for sound, giving that low level access to sound. Following that logic, Howler.js is to Web Audio like Threejs is to 3D graphics. Maybe once web audio is fully adopted, we'll see Instagram-like filters start to show up for audio!

Several large technology and media companies leverage Howler.js including Google, Disney, mozilla, and Lego.

Howler.js maintains a modular architecture starting at 7KB gzipped. Howler.js is available under the MIT open source license. Contributions are welcome via the Howler.js GitHub project.